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POTATO CAKES
Mix thoroughly with cold, mashed potatoes left from dinner, the well-beaten yolk of an egg; make into cakes as you would sausages, place in skillet with a table-spoon hot ham or beef-drippings, cover tightly, and, in five minutes, when lower side is browned, turn, remove cover, fry until the other side is a nice brown; serve hot. Make up after dinner ready for frying for breakfast.
POTATOES A LA DUCHESSE are now the most fashionable, and, if a really good potato is capable of being improved, perhaps this is the best method. Take cold, mashed potatoes, roll out and form into little biscuit-shaped cakes (a little flour will be required to form them, but do not mix flour with the potato), arrange cakes on a pie-plate, glaze them over with beaten egg, and bake to a delicate brown.
A fragment recipe built to use up mashed potato, and it still works exactly as written. Two variants sit in one paragraph: a covered pan-fry and a baked version glazed with egg.
- The hinge is dry potatoCold mashed potato that was made with much milk or cream will slump in the pan and refuse to hold a cake. Leftovers from a stiff, well-drained mash shape best; if the mixture feels wet, chill it thoroughly before forming.
- ProportionsOne egg yolk binds roughly two cups of mashed potato, enough for four to six cakes. Add salt and pepper — the original assumes the potato was already seasoned at dinner.
- "Skillet" and the lidA heavy cast-iron or steel frying pan over medium heat. The lid for the first five minutes traps steam and warms the cake through before the second side is browned uncovered, which is why the sequence is worth following.
- Ham or beef drippingsSaved pan fat from the previous day's roast or ham, kept in a crock. Bacon fat, clarified butter or a neutral oil all substitute; drippings carry more flavour, which is the whole point in a dish this plain.
- Potatoes à la Duchesse: ovenNo temperature is given. Bake at 400°F for 20 to 25 minutes, until the egg glaze is set and browned at the edges. A hotter oven colours the glaze before the cake heats through.
- Flour on the outside onlyThe instruction not to mix flour into the potato is deliberate. Flour worked through the mash makes the cakes pasty; it is there purely to keep the dough from sticking to the board and hands.
- Making up the night beforeThe book has you shape the cakes after dinner for the morning. Cover them and refrigerate rather than leaving them out overnight — a raw-egg-bound potato mixture at room temperature for eight hours is not a risk worth taking.
- Modern duchesseToday the name usually means potato piped through a star tube into rosettes. The hand-shaped biscuit form here looks like a simpler, probably earlier version of the same idea.
Both of these belong to the part of Buckeye Cookery given over to using up what dinner left behind — a working principle in an 1870s and '80s household where potatoes were cheap, plentiful and cooked in quantity, and waste was treated as an economic and moral failing alike. The compilers' aside that potatoes à la duchesse are "now the most fashionable" catches a specific moment: French service and French dish names were spreading through American middle-class cookbooks in the decades after the Civil War, and a Midwestern compilation could offer a duchesse potato in the same breath as a fried leftover cake without any sense of contradiction. The egg glaze doing the browning is a French technique, and the caution against working flour into the potato reads like advice drawn from experience.